All well and good in a different kind of film. But other scenes break with the gritty reality and go for Chaplinesque bathos. Missing-person posters of Michele go up all over Paris-- all over, on every Metro wall and construction site--and Alex sets them afire (why is there no one else in the Metro?). Then he torches the van of the man who is hanging the posters, and the man burns alive. This melodramatic excess leads, after a time, to a romantic conclusion that seems to dare us to laugh; Carax piles one development on top of another until it's not a story, it's an exercise in absurdity.
All of this is not without charm. Juliette Binoche, from "The English Patient," Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Blue" and Louis Malle's "Damage," dares to play her character with the kind of broad strokes you'd find in a silent film, and old Klaus-Michael Gruber has a touching moment of confession as Hans. Denis Lavant is not a likable Alex, but then how could he be? His approach to romance is simple: He makes his most dramatic demonstration of love in her absence, by burning the posters so she will not leave him; when she's there, he's likely to be sullen, petulant or drunk. For two strong young people to embrace their lifestyle is itself an exercise in stylish defeatism; they have to choose to be miserable, and they do, wearing it well.
I felt a certain affection for "The Lovers on the Bridge." It is not the masterpiece its defenders claim, nor is it the completely self-indulgent folly described by its critics. It has grand gestures and touching moments of truth, perched precariously on a foundation of horsefeathers.
So troubled was its distribution history that Carax waited seven years to make another film, which confirmed his unshakably goofy world view. That was "Pola X," which opened the 1999 Cannes festival, and was a modern telling of Melville's 19th century novel Pierre, about a young man's idyllic relationship with his mother and his happy plans for marriage, all destroyed by the appearance of a strange dark woman who claims to be his father's secret daughter. The movie "exists outside the categories of good and bad," I wrote from Cannes; "it is a magnificent folly." "The Lovers on the Bridge," on the other hand, exists just inside the category of good. I am not sure, thinking about the two films, that I don't prefer "Pola X." If you have little taste or discipline as a filmmaker but great style and heedlessness, it may be more entertaining to go for broke than to fake a control you don't possess.
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